This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Peter Frampton has run the gamut of experiences in his 60 years on earth, from superstardom to obscurity and from addiction to recovery.

But there’s only one thing in his life that the artist appearing at Massey Hall on July 22 really regrets: appearing shirtless on the April 22, 1976 cover of Rolling Stone in a photo by Francesco Scavullo that wound up adorning millions of bedroom walls around the world.

“I still play that moment over and over in my head,” says Frampton on the phone from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he’s on tour, “because it’s when I stopped being thought of as a serious musician and became a piece of pop candy.

“It’s like a scene in a movie for me. We’ve been in the studio for three hours and Francesco says, right at the very end, ‘Peter, Peter, take your shirt off for one shot, just for me, we won’t use it.’

“One click. That’s all it took. The embarrassment meter in my stomach was at 12 out of 10, saying no, no, no. But I’m a people pleaser, so I let him do it and nothing was ever the same again.”

Article Continued Below

He’s quiet for a long time before speaking again. “A great reminder, mate. Never say yes when you mean no.”

It may have taken Frampton a long time to get to this point, but his recent work has been driven by an honesty and openness that only comes from a lifetime of trial and error.

His 2006 instrumental album, Fingerprints, won him a Grammy and his 2009 release, Thank You, Mr. Churchill, shows him in an autobiographical vein you would have never expected from the guy behind Frampton Comes Alive!

The title cut is “a thank you to Winston Churchill for bringing my Dad back home alive from World War II so that he could conceive me,” says Frampton and even though he wasn’t born until 1950, five years after the troops returned, he still retains some vivid childhood memories of the period.

“I remember a lot of bombed-out buildings, only I didn’t know they were bombed out. I just thought they weren’t completed. My mother had to go down with a ration book and get certain food for me as a child.

“My very first memory, in fact, was going into a government building with her and getting orange juice, which they gave us in a medicine bottle.”

But those snapshots from the past soon fade in favour of the one thing that dominated the Frampton home: music.

“There wasn’t a moment around when we weren’t listening to, or singing, or playing some sort of tune,” he recalls. “My parents’ generation were exhausted and trying to put the pieces of their world together after the war. A rebuilding. A rejuvenation. A time for music.”

One group in particular carries that sound in Frampton’s mind. “The Hot Club de France,” he says, evoking the quirky jazz quintet founded in the 1930s by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.

“I hear their music and it puts me right back at 12 Woodley Dr. where I was born. I see the record player, the old valve radio, everything. To this day, I must have 200 tracks by them on my iPod and I put them on when I’m at a loss for what to play.”

Frampton’s love for music broke out early, joining his first band, The Little Ravens, at the age of 10. “Back then I wanted to be Hank Marvin,” he recalls, citing the lead guitarist of The Shadows, Cliff Richards’ backup band.

From then on, he kept moving upwards, making the difficult transition from child star to teen idol and then trying to break free from that cage as well.

“The life of a teen idol is two years, max. But if you’re a musician, that’s for a lifetime.”

What wound up helping and hurting Frampton at the same time were his golden good looks. “People used to say, ‘If you’re that pretty, you can’t be that talented,’ but I never felt that way. I looked like my parents, so I thought it was never anything special.”

Life became hard for Frampton during the ’80s, with albums failing to sell, marriages breaking up and alcohol taking over an increasing piece of his existence.

“It took quite a while for me to hit bottom, because I wasn’t an everyday drinker,” he explains. “I’d go in and out. A binger. I said I was into ‘controlled drinking’ and we all know that works. Ha, ha.”

Then, in 2003, “one night I just went out and don’t remember how I got home and all kinds of damage had been done. It was either sort myself out, or that was the end of me, my marriage and everything.”

With sobriety, Frampton not only saved all those things, but rediscovered his creativity. “I learned you didn’t need any artificial stimulus to find inspiration. Writing is so much easier and more enjoyable now.

“I wrote a great riff when I was stoned. But I never wrote a great song.”

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com